I can’t recall much of the plot of the film I am trying to trace, but it involved the main male character being tricked into thinking that his adult daughter (of whom he was unaware) was actually her mother (i.e. his partner (wife?) with whom he had conceived the child many years earlier). I also have a vague recollection that the meeting with his daughter took place in a classic European city e.g. Rome, Madrid, Paris, Milan, Barcelona etc but might be wrong on this point. Not much to go on but can anyone help? Thank you!
I believe this may be the 1976 film Obsession, directed by Brian De Palma. A truly terrific film. Maybe my favorite De Palma film.
In that film, a wealthy architect’s wife and young daughter are kidnapped. The ransom payment goes bad, and both wife and daughter appear to die in a fiery car crash when the kidnappers flee from the police. Several years later, while in Florence, Italy, the architect sees a young woman who is the exact image of his dead wife. He becomes obsessed with her and the two fall in love and marry. But at the end of the movie, the audience learns that the woman is in fact the architect’s grown daughter. She was not in the car when it crashed and burned. The man who planned the kidnapping raised the child in Europe. He convinced her that her father betrayed her and her mother; that he did not care enough for them to make the ransom payment. The chance meeting in Florence and their marriage is all part of an elaborate plot to bankrupt the architect and get revenge on him for failing to make the original ransom payment. The doppelganger wife is “kidnapped” in exactly the manner as the first wife, and he is given the chance again to liquidate his fortune to save his wife. It is all very twisted.
1 Like
Yes, that’s the one! Brilliant! Thank you very much.